This post will be a little different: it’s an interview post – not a Q&A, but an actual interview – with a conservationist and business owner whom I met in real life. It’s also not focused on big cats, but a conservation topic of equal importance: native plants ..read more

A remarkable event took place recently that went largely unnoticed by the world: tigers were reintroduced to Kazakhstan ..read more

This is a post that originally appeared on Lonely Conservationists, but I've decided to reprint it here in my "signature style," to open this conversation to people outside of the conservation industry, and because it's been about 25 years since I've posted anything ..read more

Image by lilarraza from Pixabay.Introduction I have something special for you today: an on-topic post. It is about Northern Jaguar Project (NJP), which is a group that’s helping to conserve jaguars near the border of the United States and Mexico. By embracing both the social and ecological aspects of conservation, NJP has been able to make a positive difference for jaguars and for the people who live near them. Wildlife does not exist in a vacuum, and neither do people: our lives are linked, and sometimes in profound ways. Few creatures exemplify this more than jaguars, which have played major ..read more

Jaguar by Martinus Scriblerus. Found on Flickr. CC BY 2.0. Would you look at that, the first new blog post in two months! As always, I didn’t intend to fall off the blog, but I needed to prioritize “real life” over blogging. Here’s a summary of what’s been happening: For the first time since COVID, I’ve been in one place for more than a year. It’s strange – and not altogether pleasant – to no longer be enmeshed in constant drama, to have a routine, and not to have to worry about bears OR wildfires. But fear not, I’ve filled all of my free time with self-imposed obligations, so that I still don ..read more

This post continues the tale of my AmeriCorps term in Boulder, Colorado in 2020. The rest of this series can be found here. Pretty much the size of the rock that we were trying to move. Okay, not really. Image found on PIxabay. My previous entry in this AmeriCorps series detailed events that took place on August 26, 2020. On that day, my coworker Clay and I tried to move a large rock with rock bars: thin, iron poles that could act as levers when used intelligently. Since intelligence was something that neither Clay nor I excelled at, we failed at moving our rock to the designated spot. Thus, o ..read more

This post continues the story of my AmeriCorps service term in Boulder, Colorado in 2020. The rest of this series can be found here. Three of my fellow AmeriCorps members: Clay, Sarah, and Maggie, hiking on August 25, 2020. There are moments in life – rare ones – when you feel like you’ve made progress. Brief feelings of mastery, like when Anakin Skywalker believed he’d surpassed Obi-Wan, only to have all of his remaining limbs severed and to be burned alive. August 26, 2020 was one of those moments for me. Back on August 11, 2020, our dictator leader Jo had me “crown” a section of trail that ..read more

This post continues the story of my AmeriCorps service term in Boulder, Colorado in 2020. The rest of this series can be found here. A mule deer near the Joder house on August 23, 2020. August 24, 2020 was an unusual day during my AmeriCorps term in Colorado. It began normally enough, but in the afternoon we went on a field trip. The morning started the same as always: we made our way to the Fern-Mesa reroute project, and then got to work. For me, this meant backsloping, which involved cleaning up the backside of the trail and giving it a nice, gentle angle. After I’d finished backslapping one ..read more

This post continues the story of my AmeriCorps service term in Boulder, Colorado in 2020. The rest of this series is located here. A praying mantis that I saw on the Joder Ranch Trail around the time that the events in this post took place. Until this point, the majority of my time working with the City of Boulder’s Open Spaces and Mountain Parks (OSMP) department had been spent on the Fern-Mesa reroute project. We had been building a new section of trail; but, like I said in the last post, we were nearly done. Perhaps that’s why we received a visit from two of Boulder’s “big wigs” on August 1 ..read more

This post continues the story of my AmeriCorps term in Boulder, Colorado in 2020. It details events that took place on August 17 and 18, 2020 , and the rest of this series can be found here. A dragonfly that I encountered at the Joder homestead on August 16, 2020.August 17, 2020 As I indicated in my last post, August 13, 2020 was rough. I spent the whole morning sitting in wildfire smoke, and then felt terrible for the rest of the day. August 17 was better, except that one of our crew leaders, Bonesteel, said that we might have as little as two weeks left on the Fern-Mesa reroute project. This ..read more